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Organizing a union is no easy task in the United States. Although organizing a union is supposed to be a protected right, businesses regularly fire union supporters knowing that they face minimal punishment even if found guilty for their actions. In fact, the rights of all workers, regardless of their interest in unionization, are being whittled down. Simply put, US law doesn’t work for workers.

Moshe Z. Marvit, writing in the newspaper In These Times, provides a recent example of the ongoing legal attack on union rights, in this case those of unionized janitors. As he explains, the National Labor Relations Board, using a provision of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act designed to weaken labor solidarity:

ruled [in October 2018] that janitors in San Francisco violated the law when they picketed in front of their workplace to win higher wages, better working conditions and freedom from sexual harassment in their workplace.

The provision in question is one that prohibits workers from engaging in actions against a so-called “secondary” employer. The provision makes it illegal for workers to organize boycotts or pickets directed against an employer with which the union does not have a dispute in order to get that firm to pressure the union’s employer to settle its dispute with the union.

The NLRB’s ruling dramatically stretches the meaning of this provision, in that the San Francisco janitors were actually engaged in workplace actions against an employer that had significant influence over their terms of employment. However, Board members were able to justify their ruling thanks to the complexities generated by the increasingly common corporate strategy of subcontracting.

In this case, the janitors were employed by Ortiz Janitorial Services, which was in turn subcontracted by Preferred Building Services, to work in the building of yet a third company. An administrative law judge had previously ruled that Preferred Building Services had meaninful control over the employment terms of the janitors hired by Ortiz Janitorial Services.

More specifically, the judge found “that Preferred Building Services was involved in the hiring, firing, disciplining, supervision, direction of work, and other terms and conditions of the janitors’ employment with Ortiz Janitorial Services.” That made Ortiz and Preferred joint employers of the janitors, and the worker’s actions legal. Undeterred, the NLRB simply rejected the administrative law judge’s ruling, declaring instead that the janitors worked only for Ortiz which made the worker’s actions, which were also aimed at Preferred, illegal.

As Marvit summarizes:

The NLRB’s recent case restricting the picketing rights of subcontractors, temps and other workers who do not have a single direct employment relationship is a further sign that the labor board will continue limiting its joint employer doctrine. This will make it more difficult or even impossible for many workers to have any meaningful voice in the workplace. But the case also highlights some of the core problems of labor law as it currently exists. By being included under the NLRA, workers lose basic rights that all other Americans enjoy.

Given how important the use of subcontracted labor has become, it should surprise no one that Trump’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board are actively working to tighten the standard under which workers can claim to face, and organize against, a joint employer.

But the attack on worker rights is not limited to efforts to weaken union power. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote in May, ruled in Epic Systems Corp v. Lewis, that employers can include a clause in their employment contract requiring nonunion workers to arbitrate their disputes individually, a ruling that eliminates the ability of workers to sue a company for workplace violations or use collective actions such as class action suits. The ruling resolved three separate cases–Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, Ernst & Young LLP v. Morris, and National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil USA–that were argued together in front of the Court on the same day because they all raised the same basic issue.

Marvit explains what led to Lewis’s decision to sue Epic Systems:

On April 2, 2014, Jacob Lewis, who was a technical writer for Epic Systems, received an email from his employer with a document titled “Mutual Arbitration Agreement Regarding Wages and Hours.” The document stated that the employee and the employer waive their rights to go to court and instead agreed to take all wage and hour claims to arbitration. Furthermore, unlike in court, the employee agreed that any arbitration would be one-on-one. This “agreement” did not provide any opportunity to negotiate, and it had no place to sign or refuse to sign. Instead, it stated, “I understand that if I continue to work at Epic, I will be deemed to have accepted this Agreement.” The workers had two choices: immediately quit or accept the agreement. . . .

When Lewis tried to take Epic Systems to court for misclassifying him and his fellow workers as independent contractors and depriving them of overtime pay, he realized that by opening the email and continuing to work, he waved his right to bring a collective action or go to court.

As the Court saw it, the case pitted the Federal Arbitration Act against the National Labor Relations Act. The former established a legal foundation for using one-on-one arbitration to settle disputes while the latter gives workers the right to work together for “mutual aid and protection.” The Court’s ruling priviledged arbitration.

As for loud liberal voices — union and nonunion — that declare unions as a thing of the past, the forthcoming SCOTUS ruling on NLRB v Murphy Oil will prove most of the nonunion “innovations” moot. Murphy Oil is a complicated legal case that boils down to removing what are called the Section 7 protections under the National Labor Relations Act, and preventing class action lawsuits.

Murphy Oil blows a hole through the legal safeguards that non-union workers have enjoyed for decades, eviscerating much of the tactical repertoire of so-called Alt Labor, such as class-action wage-theft cases, and workers participating in protests called by nonunion community groups in front of their workplaces. The timing is horrific and uncanny: As women are finally finding their voices about sexual harassment at work, mostly in nonunion workplaces (as the majority are), Murphy Oil will prevent class action sexual harassment lawsuits.

The Epic Systems decision is a big deal, since there is a growing and already sizeable use of mandatory arbitration by employers. A study by the Economic Policy Institutefound that:

More than half—53.9 percent—of nonunion private-sector employers have mandatory arbitration procedures. Among companies with 1,000 or more employees, 65.1 percent have mandatory arbitration procedures.

Among private-sector nonunion employees, 56.2 percent are subject to mandatory employment arbitration procedures. Extrapolating to the overall workforce, this means that 60.1 million American workers no longer have access to the courts to protect their legal employment rights and instead must go to arbitration.

Of the employers who require mandatory arbitration, 30.1 percent also include class action waivers in their procedures—meaning that in addition to losing their right to file a lawsuit on their own behalf, employees also lose the right to address widespread rights violations through collective legal action.

Large employers are more likely than small employers to include class action waivers, so the share of employeesaffected is significantly higher than the share of employers engaging in this practice: of employees subject to mandatory arbitration, 41.1 percent have also waived their right to be part of a class action claim. Overall, this means that 23.1 percent of private-sector nonunion employees, or 24.7 million American workers, no longer have the right to bring a class action claim if their employment rights have been violated.

Mandatory arbitration is more common in low-wage workplaces. It is also more common in industries that are disproportionately composed of women workers and in industries that are disproportionately composed of African American workers.

The Court’s decision means that workers without unions will have little power. The NLRB’s decision weakens the laws that are supposed to protect union rights. The only effective response to this trend is, as the recent wave of teacher strikes demonstrated, militant, rank and file-led union organizing, with strong community involvement and support. Hopefully, exposing the class-biased nature of US laws may help encourage this kind of activism.

Dominant corporations have dramatically increased their market power in the US over the last decades, allowing them to boost their profits and, by extension, political power. And, although rarely acknowledged by the media, this trend owes much to the way public policy has promoted corporate intellectual property rights at the public expense.

The growing concentration of market power

Gwynn Guilford, drawing on a study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, highlights the growing concentration of market power with the aid of the following charts.

The first chart shows that while 109 public corporations captured half of the total profits earned by all public corporations in 1975, that number fell to just 30 by 2015. And as the second chart reveals, this growth in market concentration is reflected in other key market indicators as well, such as control over assets, cash flow, and cash holdings.

A recent International Monetary Fund working paper provides additional evidence of the growth in corporate market power, highlighting the ability of leading corporations to markup their prices and increase their profit share. Defining market power as “the ability of a firm to maintain prices above marginal cost—the level that would prevail under perfect competition,” the authors of the IMF paper “estimate markups between prices and marginal costs for publicly traded firms in 33 advanced economies and 41 emerging market and developing economies from 1980-2016.” According to the authors, “this is the first study . . . to report firm-level markups for such a broad range of economies over such an extended period.”

The figure below shows a dramatic increase in markups by US publicly listed firms, which means that US firms have enjoyed growing power to push up their prices relative to their costs of production.

As the authors report:

markups of U.S. firms have increased by a sales-weighted average of 42 percent during 1980-2016. Markups increased across all major industries, and not only technology ones, with the sales-weighted average increase ranging between 7 and 137 percent for the 10 broad FTSE/Dow Jones Industrial Classification Benchmark industries available within Thomson Reuters Worldscope.

Some industry subsectors, especially those in Health Care, like Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals, have seen extreme increases (as shown in the following figure). “The sub-sector featuring the largest increase in markups over this period (by 419 percent) is ‘Biotechnology,’ part of the ‘Health Care’ industry.”

The growing economic wealth and power of big companies—from airlines to pharmaceuticals to high-tech companies—has raised concerns about too much concentration and market power in the hands of too few. In particular, in advanced economies, rising corporate market power has been blamed for low investment despite rising corporate profits, declining business dynamism, weak productivity, and a falling share of income paid to workers.

The role of public policy in promoting market concentration, profits, and power

Public policy, in particular, government efforts to promote and protect corporate intellectual property rights (e.g. patents and copyrights), is one reason for the trend in market concentration. As Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, explains:

Patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property are public policy. They are not facts given to us by the world or the structure of technology somehow. While this point should be self-evident, it is rarely noted in discussions of inequality or ways to address it.

[And] there is an enormous amount of money at stake with intellectual property rules. Many items that sell at high prices as a result of patent or copyright protection would be free or nearly free in the absence of these government granted monopolies. Perhaps the most notable example is prescription drugs where we will spend over $420 billion in 2018 in the United States for drugs that would almost certainly cost less than $105 billion in a free market. The difference is $315 billion annually or 1.6 percent of GDP. If we add in software, medical equipment, pesticides, fertilizer, and other areas where these protections account for a large percentage of the cost, the gap between protected prices and free market prices likely approaches $1 trillion annually, a sum that is more than 60 percent of after-tax corporate profits.

The US patent system has helped boost the monopoly power of many of the country’s most profitable firms in numerous ways. For example, the government has increased the duration of both patents and copyrights. Even more importantly, the government has steadily expanded the scope of what can be patented to “include biological organisms, software, and business methods.” This expansion has enabled corporations to lockup an ever-growing number of products and processes, and force other companies to pay them for their use.

US laws also generally privilege patent and copyright holders when it comes to challenges. For example, a company that feels its copyright is being infringed can sue not only to reclaim lost royalty payments but also for damages, which can greatly increase the financial stakes. In addition, the government often prosecutes copyright cases criminally, turning a possibly small financial violation into a potentially major criminal offense.

Baker offers another example of the one-sided nature of the US intellectual property rights regime:

the Digital Millennial Copyright Act of 1998 holds third parties potentially liable for infringement. In order to protect themselves from liability, a web intermediary has the responsibility for promptly taking down allegedly infringing material after being notified. This effectively requires an intermediary to take the side of the person alleging infringement against their customer or friend. By contrast, the law in Canada simply requires that the intermediary notify the person posting the alleged infringing material, after which point they have ended their potential liability.

Perhaps even more revealing of the pro-corporate nature of government policy is the fact that government spending has often financed the innovations that private firms then patent and benefit from. Considering prescription drugs again, the US National Institutes of Health spends approximately $37 billion a year on biomedical research. Other government agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control, spend smaller but still significant amounts. But, following the passage of the Boyh-Dale act in December 1980, the government, as Baker explains, has allowed “researchers on government contracts to gain ownership rights to their research. This meant they could get patents or other types of protection on work for which the government incurred much or all of the cost. While Bayh–Dole applied to all types of research supported by the government it had the largest impact on the market for prescription drugs.”

Paris Marx offers another example of this public subsidization of private profit-making, noting the ways public research provided key discoveries that made possible the success of the iphone:

Steve Jobs may have been a genius—he certainly had an eye for design—but his most successful product would not exist if it weren’t for the billions of dollars that the US government spends every year on research and development. The best accounting of this has been done by Mariana Mazzucato, author of “The Entrepreneurial State,” who skillfully explains that touch-screen displays, GPS, the Internet and even Siri were the product of public research funding—features the iPhone wouldn’t be very compelling without.

And that’s not to say that Apple should get no credit for the revolutionary product it created. The company assembled those technologies in a compelling package and has developed many of its own innovations to enhance it along the way. But that doesn’t change the fact that the fundamentals wouldn’t exist without the government.

we continue to romanticize private actors in innovative industries, ignoring their dependence on the products of public investment. Elon Musk, for example, has not only received over $5 billion in subsidies from the US government; his companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have been built on the work of NASA and the Department of Energy, respectively.

Recognizing the value of strong private industry-protecting intellectual property rights, leading corporations have been pushing their respective governments to demand tougher rights as part of new trade agreements, making this a global problem. Here is what the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has to say:

Paradoxically, even as tangible barriers to trade imposed by governments, such as tariffs and quotas, have been declining over the last 30 years or so, intangible barriers to competition rooted in “free trade” treaties and erected by large firms themselves have surged, as they exploit the increased legal protection of intellectual property and the broadening scope for intangible intra-firm trade. According to some estimates, intangible assets may represent up to two thirds of the value of large firms. . . .

Returns to knowledge-intensive intangible assets proxied by charges for the use of foreign IPR rose almost unabated throughout the [global financial crisis] and its after­math, even as returns to tangible assets declined. At the global level, charges (i.e. payments) for the use of foreign IPR rose from less than $50 billion in 1995 to $367 billion in 2015. . . .

The rise of intangible barriers that further distort competition, increase corporate leverage and foster monopolistic rents has been partly supported by changes to domestic laws in many countries. But international treaties may have been even more significant, such as double non-taxation agreements and new generation trade agreements that include provisions strengthening the protection of IPR, foreign investment, etc.

The US government has been one of the most aggressive governments pushing this international expansion of restrictive intellectual property rights. The recently negotiated US-Mexico-Canada agreement is, as Peter Dolack describes, a prime example:

It appears that corporate wish lists for intellectual property, financial services and other areas were largely granted. New IP rules, if this agreement is passed into law, include stepped-up enforcement against “camcording of movies” and “cable signal theft,” as well as “Broad protection against trade secret theft.”

The IP rules would extend copyrights to 75 years, long a U.S. demand (and one opposed by the Canadian government); increase pressure on Internet service providers to take works alleged to infringe copyrights (in actuality a tool for censorship); and provide for “strong protection for pharmaceutical and agricultural innovators,” which can be presumed to be code for enabling further medicine price-gouging and crimping accessibility to generic and cheaper alternatives. The last of these was a prominent U.S. goal for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which, inter alia, sought to eliminate the New Zealand government’s program to provide medicines in bulk at discounted prices at the behest of U.S. pharmaceutical companies. Related to this is a measure to include 10 years’ protection for biologic drugs and an expansion of products eligible for “protection.”

We need a different public policy

In short, it appears that the existing IPR regime has largely helped to promote monopoly power, higher prices, and greater inequality, and at the public expense. We need a new policy, and, setting aside the daunting political obstacles to change, it is easy to see possibilities for a different and more publicly spirited policy.

For example, we could reduce both the scope of what is patentable as well as the length of patents, thereby weakening monopoly power and promoting lower prices. And likely at little “economic” cost. Patents and copyrights are supposed to encourage innovation and productivity gains. Yet, as Baker notes:

A cross-country analysis assessing the impact of stronger protections on productivity growth found no evidence of a positive relationship. In fact, most of the regressions found a negative relationship between patent strength and productivity growth. Similarly, an analysis that looked at multi-factor productivity growth across industries found no relationship between the number of patents issued and the rate of productivity growth.

And we could also end the government’s direct subsidization of privately patented products. For example, the government could boost its funding of health research though long-term contracts with drug and other health related businesses, with the requirement “that all research findings and patents are placed in the public domain. An advantage of [this] approach is that all research findings would be available for both clinicians and other researchers.” The public gains from a change in policy, especially in the health field, would likely be enormous.

In sum, we need to go beyond bemoaning current trends, which impoverish us in a variety of ways. Rather, we need to press for an end to the existing public policies that encourage them and for the development of a new intellectual property rights regime that actually serves the public interest.

In most states in the United States, the rich have enjoyed ever lower rates of taxation while working people have suffered from inadequately funded public services. Calls for an end to this situation are more often than not met with statements by state officials and the wealthy themselves that higher taxes on the rich will prove counterproductive; the rich will just move to lower-tax states. In fact, research by the sociologist Christobal Young shows that this is largely an empty threat. The rich rarely move to escape high taxes.

The threat

Oregon offers one example of this threat. In 2009, the Oregon Legislature passed two measures (66 and 67) in an effort to boost funding for education, health and public safety. Measure 66 would raise taxes on high income Oregonians—couples earning over $250,000 a year and individuals earning over $125,000 a year. Measure 67 would raise taxes on profitable corporations.

Opponents of the measures succeeded in placing them on the ballot, hoping that they could scare voters into rejecting them. Almost all major business leaders threatened calamity if they passed. For example, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike, not only gave $100,000 to the anti-measures campaign, he also wrote an article published in the Oregonian newspaper in which he said:

Measures 66 and 67 should be labeled Oregon’s Assisted Suicide Law II.

They will allow us to watch a state slowly killing itself.

They are anti-business, anti-success, anti-inspirational, anti-humanitarian, and most ironically, in the long run, they will deprive the state of tax revenue, not increase it. . . .

Reputable economists forecast 66 and 67 will cost the state thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of jobs, and that thousands of our most successful residents will leave the state.

Knight ended his letter with his own threat to leave the state if the measures passed. However, voters approved both measures, and Nike and Phil Knight remain in Oregon.

As California considered similar taxes [to Oregon], policymakers cautioned “nothing is more mobile than a millionaire and his money”. In New Jersey, governor Chris Christie simply stated: “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you tax them, they will leave.”

The reality

Young studied tax return data, which shows where people live, for every million-dollar earner in the United States over the years 1999 to 2011. His data set included “3.7 million top-earning individuals, who collectively filed more than 45 million tax returns.”

What he found was that the migration rate of millionaires was relatively low, with only 2.4 percent of millionaires changing their state residence in a given year. Perhaps not surprisingly, as we see below, poorer people tend to move from one state to another more often than do millionaires.

Young does note that “When millionaires do move, they admittedly tend to favor lower-tax states over higher-tax ones – but only marginally so. Around 15 percent of interstate millionaire migrations bring a net tax advantage. The other 85 percent have no net tax impact for the movers.”

Moreover, almost all the movement by millionaires to lower-tax states is accounted for by moves to just one state, Florida. Other low-tax states, like Texas, were not net-recipients of millionaires fleeing high-tax states. In short there is no real evidence that millionaires systematically move from high-tax states to low-tax states.

Young believes that one major reason for the lack of migration by the rich is that “migration is a young person’s game.” As the figure below shows, people tend to move for education and early in their careers. Thus:

By the time people hit their early forties, PhDs, college grads and high school drop-outs all show the same low rate of migration. Typically, millionaires are society’s highly educated at an advanced career stage. They are typically the late-career working rich: established professionals in management, finance, consulting, medicine, law and similar fields. And they have low migration because they are both socially and economically embedded in place.

The global story

Young finds the global story is much the same. He examined the 2010 Forbes list of world’s billionaires and found that approximately 85 percent still lived in their country of birth. Moreover, as he explains:

among those who do live abroad, most moved to their current country of residence long before they became wealthy – either as children with their parents, or as students going abroad to study (and then staying). . . . Only about 5% of world billionaires moved abroad after they became successful.

The take-away

The rich have both increased their share of income and reduced their share of state taxes over the last decades. This has left most states unable to provide the critical public services working people need. Young’s study demonstrates that we should not allow fears of “rich flight” to keep us from building “tax the rich movements” across the United States.

These are supposed to be the good times—with our current economic expansion poised to set a record as the longest in US history. Yet, according to the Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2017, forty percent of American adults don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense such as an unexpected medical bill, car problem or home repair.

The problem with our economy isn’t that it sometimes hits a rough patch. It’s that people struggle even when it is setting records.

The expansion is running out of steam

Our current economic expansion has already gone 107 months. Only one expansion has lasted longer: the expansion from March 1991 to March 2001 which lasted 120 months.

A CNBC Market Insider report by Patti Domm quotes Goldman Sachs economists as saying: “The likelihood that the expansion will break the prior record is consistent with our long-standing view that the combination of a deep recession and an initially slow recovery has set us up for an unusually long cycle.”

The Goldman Sachs model, according to Domm:

shows an increased 31 percent chance for a U.S. recession in the next nine quarters. That number is rising. But it’s a good news, bad news story, and the good news is there is now a two-thirds chance that the recovery will be the longest on record. . . . The Goldman economists also say the medium-term risk of a recession is rising, “mainly because the economy is at full employment and still growing above trend.”

The chart below highlights the growing recession risk based on a Goldman Sachs model that looks at “lagged GDP growth, the slope of the yield curve, equity price changes, house price changes, the output gap, the private debt/GDP ratio, and economic policy uncertainty.”

Sooner or later, the so-called good times are coming to an end. Tragically, a large percent of Americans are still struggling at a time when our “economy is at full employment and still growing above trend.” That raises the question: what’s going to happen to them and millions of others when the economy actually turns down?

Living on the edge

The Federal Reserve’s report was based on interviews with a sample of over 12,000 people that was “designed to be representative of adults ages 18 and older living in the United States.” One part of the survey dealt with unexpected expenses. Here is what the report found:

Approximately four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money. The following figure shows that the share of Americans facing financial insecurity has been falling, but it is still alarming that the percentage remains so high this late in a record setting expansion.

Strikingly, the Federal Reserve survey also found, as shown in the table below, that “(e)ven without an unexpected expense, 22 percent of adults expected to forgo payment on some of their bills in the month of the survey. Most frequently, this involves not paying, or making a partial payment on, a credit card bill.”

And, as illustrated in the figure below, twenty-seven percent of adult Americans skipped necessary medical care in 2017 because they were unable to afford its cost. The table that follows shows that “dental care was the most frequently skipped treatment, followed by visiting a doctor and taking prescription medicines.”

Clearly, we need more and better jobs and a stronger social safety net. Achieving those will require movement building. Needed first steps include helping those struggling see that their situation is not unique, a consequence of some individual failing, but rather is the result of the workings of a highly exploitative system that suffers from ever stronger stagnation tendencies. And this requires creating opportunities for people to share experiences and develop their will and capacity to fight for change. In this regard, there may be much to learn from the operation of the Councils of the Unemployed during the 1930s.

It also requires creating opportunities for struggle. Toward that end we need to help activists build connections between ongoing labor and community struggles, such as the ones that education and health care workers are making as they fight for improved conditions of employment and progressive tax measures to fund a needed expansion of public services. This is the time, before the next downturn, to lay the groundwork for a powerful movement for social transformation.

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This post was updated May 31, 2018. The original post misstated the length of the current expansion.

Public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona have won meaningful salary gains for themselves, and in several cases other school workers, and real although limited increases in education spending. Unfortunately, their demands for significant tax reform, including new taxes on corporations and the wealthy to fund a more general increase in public services, remain largely unfulfilled. Hopefully, the lessons learned and the connections made will lead to more democratic and powerful unions and worker-community movements for change that can carry the fight forward.

Teachers deserved a raise

Teachers definitely deserve a raise. A recent Economic Policy Institutestudy by Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel finds a substantial and growing wage and compensation gap between what teachers and other similarly educated workers earn. For example:

Average weekly wages (inflation adjusted) of public-sector teachers decreased $30 per week from 1996 to 2015, from $1,122 to $1,092 (in 2015 dollars). In contrast, weekly wages of all college graduates rose from $1,292 to $1,416 over this period.

For all public-sector teachers, the relative wage gap (regression adjusted for education, experience, and other factors) has grown substantially since the mid-1990s: It was ‑1.8 percent in 1994 and grew to a record ‑17.0 percent in 2015.

While relative teacher wage gaps have widened, some of the difference may be attributed to a tradeoff between pay and benefits. Non-wage benefits as a share of total compensation in 2015 were more important for teachers (26.6 percent) than for other professionals (21.6 percent). The total teacher compensation penalty was a record-high 11.1 percent in 2015 (composed of a 17.0 percent wage penalty plus a 5.9 percent benefit advantage). The bottom line is that the teacher compensation penalty grew by 11 percentage points from 1994 to 2015.

Collective bargaining helps to abate the teacher wage gap. In 2015, teachers not represented by a union had a ‑25.5 percent wage gap—and the gap was 6 percentage points smaller for unionized teachers.

The figure below highlights the growing wage gap between public school teachers and similar workers (controlling for age, education, race/ethnicity, geographic region, marital status, and gender).

The next figure shows that in no state are teachers paid more than other college graduates. In fact, as the EPI study points out:

The ratio for the overall United States is 0.77, meaning that, on average, teachers earn just 77 percent of what other college graduates earn in wages. . . . In 18 states, public school teacher weekly wages lag by more than 25 percent. In contrast, there are only five states where teacher weekly wages are less than 10 percent behind.

And, as the table below makes clear, teachers suffer an overall compensation gap, with their benefit advantage not nearly big enough to compensate for their large and growing wage penalty.

The rightwing playbook

Teacher victories in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona were made possible by strong community support for their strike actions. However, teachers and other activists need to prepare for the likely rightwing counter attack, which will aim to break the newly created bonds of solidarity and support for collective, militant action.

A Guardian newspaper article, which includes a secret three-page manual on how to talk about teacher strikes produced by the State Policy Network, sheds light on rightwing fears and planning. The State Policy Network is “an alliance of 66 rightwing ‘ideas factories’ that span every state in the nation,” that is well funded by, among others, the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation, and the DeVos family.

The manual talks about the need to discredit the strikes by portraying them as harmful to low income parents and their children. But it also recognizes that this is a challenging task. For example, it says:

A message that focuses on teacher hours or summer vacations will sound tone-deaf when there are dozens of videos and social media posts going vital from teachers about their second jobs, teachers having to rely on food pantries, classroom books that are falling apart, paper rationing, etc. This is an opportunity to sympathize with teachers, while still emphasizing that teacher strikes hurt kids. It is also not the right time to talk about social choice—that’s off topic, and teachers at choice-schools are often paid less than district school teachers.

As to what should be said, the manual encourages rightwing activists to respond to concerns about insufficient school funding by calling for more efficient use of existing monies, in particular by reducing “administrative bloat” and “red tape.” And, it has special advice for those that live in states where taxes have been recently slashed:

That is obviously a challenging message to counter. But you can consider something like “One of the most important things we can do to make sure our schools are properly funded is to have a strong economy where everyone who can work can find a job and contribute to the tax coffers that fund the government. Lower tax rates help contribute to stronger job growth. Also lower taxes on individuals let teachers keep more of the money they earn.”

More dangerous are some of the ways in which the rightwing actually seeks to punish or intimidate teachers. Jeff Bryant, writing at OurFuture.org provides a sobering list:

Leading into the two-day teacher walkout in Colorado, Republican legislators introduced a bill that would lead to fines and potentially up to six month’s jail time for the striking teachers. The bill was pulled, when it became clear even some Republicans weren’t too keen on the measure.

In Arizona, a libertarian think tank sent letters to school district superintendents threatening them with lawsuits if they didn’t reopen closed schools and order striking teachers to return to work. It’s unclear how or whether the threat will actually be carried out now that teachers are back on the job.

In West Virginia, where teachers used a nine-day strike to secure a five percent raise, Republicans have vowed to get their revenge by cutting $20 million to Medicaid and other parts of the state budget to pay for the increase. No doubt, when the axe falls on these programs, Republican lawmakers will be quick to blame the “greedy” teachers.

In Kentucky, Republican Governor Matt Bevin accused striking teachers of leaving children exposed to sexual assaults or being in danger of ingesting toxic substances because teachers weren’t at school. Now that the uprising has ended, Bevin has turned his revenge against teachers into an effort to take over the largest school system in the state and take away local control of the schools.

No doubt, this is just the beginning, which means that activists need to move quickly to build on victories and expand their challenge to existing relations of power.

The challenges ahead

One hopes that teacher activists in states where strikes have taken place are finding ways to build upon recent mobilizations to build organizations and revitalize their unions. And, that they are also reaching out to other public sector unions, with the aim of building a broad alliance that can spearhead a grass-roots movement for new progressive taxes and a more class conscious vision of state policy. Despite the dangers, this is a hopeful political moment for all of us.

While those at the top of the income pyramid continue to celebrate economic trends, the great majority of working people continue to struggle to make ends meet. However, teacher victories in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona demonstrate that broad-based sustained workplace organizing, labor-community solidarity, and importantly a willingness to strike, can change the balance of power in favor of working people and produce meaningful gains.

Teacher Strikes

West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona are all considered red states, with legislatures that have aggressively reduced taxes on the wealthy and corporations, slashed spending on social programs, and gutted union rights for public sector workers by denying them the right to collectively bargain or strike. Yet, after months of careful workplace and community organizing, West Virginia teachers launched a nine-day strike in February that shut down the entire state’s public school system and won them and all other state workers a 5 percent salary increase and a government promise to convene a task force to find ways to reign in worker health care costs.

Oklahoma teachers followed with their own workplace and community actions and a nine-day statewide strike in early April. The day before the start of the strike the legislature hurriedly approved salary increases of $6000 for teachers and $1250 for support staff, and days later a modest $40 million increase in the education budget. This wasn’t enough to convince the teachers to call off their strike; they had demanded a raise of $10,000 for teachers and $5,000 for support staff, $200 million for increased school funding, $213 million for state employee raises, and a $255.9 million increase in health care funding. However, after the head of the state’s largest teacher’s union called for an end to the walkout, saying that it had achieved all it could, teachers, many reluctantly, agreed to return to work without further gains.

Arizona teachers have participated in workplace actions and demonstrations to press their demand for salary increases for themselves and other education workers and a significant boost to the education budget. The governor, hoping to avoid a threatened strike, announced a plan to give teachers a 20 percent raise by 2020, including a nine percent raise this year. The teachers weren’t satisfied: they didn’t find the governor’s plan to raise their wages financially realistic, they wanted raises for all school workers, and they wanted school funding returned to its 2008 level. In a statewide vote of teachers and other school personal, approximately 80 percent voted to walk out on April 26 if their demands were not met. This would be Arizona’s first statewide walkout.

While the gains won in these states are not sufficient to reverse decades of concerted action by state legislatures to undermine public services and public workers, they are impressive nonetheless and should encourage a renewed focus on and support for workplace organizing and collective action.

Organizing To Win

These victories did not come easily. Teachers were willing to take the bold step of engaging in a technically illegal strike for at least two main reasons. The first is that they have endured terrible working conditions for years, conditions which also weighed heavily on those they teach. For example, per student instructional funding in Oklahoma was some 30 percent below its 2008 level. Some 20 percent of the state’s school districts were forced by financial pressures to adopt four-day school weeks. Textbooks remain in short supply and out of date. Classes are so overcrowded that many students must sit on the floor. And the state’s public school teachers and staff had not received a raise in ten years; pay was so low that many have been forced to work multiple jobs.

And adding insult to injury is the fact that state legislatures in all three states have slashed spending on education and teacher salaries in order to finance massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. A case in point: The Arizona legislature has cut approximately $1 billion from schools since the 2008 recession while simultaneously reducing taxes. No doubt the fact that such regressive policies were often supported by both Democratic as well as Republican lawmakers, as in Oklahoma, also encouraged teachers to embrace direct-workplace action rather than more traditional lobbying to force needed legislative changes.

The second reason is that strike votes were proceeded by months of organizing that informed and created bonds of solidarity. West Virginia was a model. Forums were held in most schools which educated and also encouraged local leadership development, teachers joined by other school workers engaged in ever more militant school-based actions, and eventually strike votes were held in every school with the participation of all teachers and staff regardless of union affiliation. Teacher activists, most of whom were rank and file union activists, used a variety of methods, including social media, to build a strong state-wide network to coordinate their work. The strike was called only when it was clear that it had the support of the overwhelming majority of teachers, support staff, and school bus drivers.

This strong rank and file base was key to the strike’s success. After five days, the Governor and teacher union leaders announced that a deal had been reached and called for an end to the strike. However, the rank and file refused. They held their strike until the state legislature actually approved an agreement that met their demands.

The Oklahoma strike was less successful in part because a weaker union movement meant fewer trained labor activists. This made it harder to engage in school-by-school organizing and forge a strong state network. As a consequence the strike was launched without the same level of workplace organization and connection to other education workers such as support staff and bus drivers. And as a result, it made it much harder for rank and file teacher activists to effectively oppose the teacher union leadership’s call to settle for what was won and to return to work. It is likely that Oklahoma law, which requires that 75 percent of the legislature vote in favor of any revenue hike, also contributed to teacher willingness to end the strike.

Arizona teachers are now preparing to strike. Teachers in Kentucky and Colorado recently engaged in one day walkouts, shutting down schools and demonstrating at their respective state capitals to protest low wages and inadequate education budgets. Discussions continue in both states about the possibility of renewed strikes to win their demands. We should be studying as well as supporting all their efforts.

Reasons to Celebrate

These teacher strikes are important and have deservedly won widespread community support. They have raised the salaries of teachers and other education workers, thereby helping their schools attract and retain talented people. They have also boosted state education budgets, which benefits the broader community, especially students and their parents. They also shine a spotlight on the destructive consequences of past tax giveaways to the rich and powerful and the need for new progressive sources of tax revenue. Finally, they show that workers can effect change, improving their own living and working conditions, even under extremely hostile conditions, through sustained workplace organization and audacity.

There is a lot of concern over the possibility of a trade war between China and the US. In early April President Trump announced that his administration was considering levying $100 billion of additional tariffs on Chinese exports, after the Chinese government responded to a previously proposed US tariff hike on Chinese goods of $50 billion by announcing its own equivalent tariff hikes on US exports. And the Chinese government has made clear it will again respond in kind if these new tariffs are actually imposed.

So, what’s it all about?

To this point, it is worth emphasizing that no new tariffs have in fact been levied, by either the US or Chinese governments. The first round of announced US tariffs on Chinese goods are still subject to a public comment period before becoming effective, and the content of the second round has yet to be formally decided upon. Thus, both countries have time to back away from their threats.

Also significant is the fact that both countries are being careful about the products they are threatening to tax. For example, the Trump administration has carefully avoided talking about placing tariffs on computers or cell phones, two of the biggest US imports from China. The US has also refrained from putting tariffs on clothing, shoes, and furniture, also major imports from China.

It is not hard to guess the reason why: these goods are produced as part of multinational corporate controlled production and marketing networks that operate under the direction of leading US corporations like Dell, Apple, and Walmart. Taxing these goods would threaten corporate profitability. As a former commissioner of the US International Trade Commission pointed out: “It seems that the U.S. trade representative was very much aware of the global value chains in keeping some of these items off the list.”

The Chinese government, for its part, as been equally careful. For example, it put smaller planes on its proposed tariff list while exempting the larger planes made by Boeing.

Although the media largely echoes President Trump’s claim that his tariff threats directed at China are all about trying to reduce the large US trade deficit with China in order to save high paying manufacturing jobs and revitalize US manufacturing, the president really has a far narrower aim—that is to protect the monopoly position and profits of dominant US corporations. The short hand phrase for this is the protection of “intellectual property rights.” As Trump tweeted in March: “The U.S. is acting swiftly on Intellectual Property theft. We cannot allow this to happen as it has for many years!”

Bloomberg News offers a more detailed explanation of the connection between the tariff threats and the goal of defending corporate intellectual property:

the White House is considering imposing tariffs on a broad range of consumer goods to punish China for its IP [intellectual property] practices. . . . the U.S. alleges . . . that China has been stealing U.S. trade secrets, forcing American companies to hand over proprietary technology as a condition of doing business on the mainland, and providing state support for Chinese firms to acquire critical technology abroad. A consensus is growing that these policies, designed to establish China as a dominant player in key technologies of the future, from semiconductors to electric cars, threaten to erode America’s technological edge, both commercial and military.

In other words, US tariff threats are, in reality, a bargaining chip to get the Chinese government to accept stronger protections for the intellectual property rights and technology of leading US firms in industries such as pharmaceuticals, aerospace, telecommunications, and autos. If Trump succeeds, US multinational corporations will become more profitable. But there will be little gain for US workers.

The auto industry offers a good case in point. President Trump has repeatedly said that forcing China to lower its tariffs on imported US cars will help the US auto industry. As he correctly points out, there is a 2.5 percent tariff on cars shipped from China to the U.S. and a 25 percent tariff on cars shipped from the U.S. to China. Trump claims that lowering the Chinese tariff would allow US automakers to export more cars to China and boost auto employment in the US.

However, GM, Ford and other automakers have already established joint ventures with Chinese firms and the great majority of the cars they sell in China are made in China. This allows them to avoid the tariff. China is GM’s biggest market and has been for six years straight. The company has 10 joint ventures and two wholly owned foreign enterprises as well as more than 58,000 employees in China. It sells approximately 4 million cars a year in China, almost all made in China.

The two largest automobile exporters from the US to China are actually German. BMW shipped 106,971 vehicles from the U.S. to China in 2017; Mercedes sent 71,198. Ford was the leading US owned auto exporter and in third place with total yearly exports of 45,145 vehicles. Fiat Chrysler was fourth with 16,545.

In short, lowering tariffs on auto imports from the US will do little to boost auto production or employment in the US, or even corporate profits. The leading US automakers have already globalized their production networks. But, changes to the joint venture law, or a toughening of intellectual property rights in China could mean a substantial boost to US automaker profits.

For its part, the Chinese government is trying to use its large state-owned enterprises, control over finance, investment restrictions on foreign investment, licensing powers, government procurement policies, and trade restrictions to build its own strong companies. These are reasonable development policies, ones very similar to those used by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. It is short-sided for progressives in the US to criticize the use of such policies. In fact, we should be advocating the development of similar state capacities in the US in order to rebuild and revitalize the US economy.

That doesn’t mean we should uncritically embrace the Chinese position. The reason is that the Chinese government is using these policies to promote highly exploitative Chinese companies that are themselves increasingly export oriented and globalizing. In other words, the Chinese state seeks only a rebalancing of power and wealth for the benefit of its own elites, not a progressive restructuring of its own or the global economy.

In sum, these threats and counter-threats over trade have little to do with defending worker interests in the US or in China. Unfortunately, this fact has been lost in the media frenzy over how to interpret Trump’s grandstanding and ever-changing policies. Moreover, the willingness of progressive analysts to join with the Trump administration in criticizing China for its use of state industrial policies ends up blurring the important distinction between the capacities and the way those capacities are being used. And that will only make it harder to build the kind of movement we need to reshape the US economy.